ture attained by the
community, and it might be added, by any given class in the community.
This remark is perhaps truer as regards the stage of economic
development than as regards development in any other respect. At the
same time the position assigned to the woman in the accepted scheme of
life, in any community or under any culture, is in a very great degree
an expression of traditions which have been shaped by the circumstances
of an earlier phase of development, and which have been but partially
adapted to the existing economic circumstances, or to the existing
exigencies of temperament and habits of mind by which the women living
under this modern economic situation are actuated.

The fact has already been remarked upon incidentally in the course of
the discussion of the growth of economic institutions generally, and
in particular in speaking of vicarious leisure and of dress, that the
position of women in the modern economic scheme is more widely and
more consistently at variance with the promptings of the instinct of
workmanship than is the position of the men of the same classes. It
is also apparently true that the woman's temperament includes a larger
share of this instinct that approves peace and disapproves futility.
It is therefore not a fortuitous circumstance that the women of modern
industrial communities show a livelier sense of the discrepancy
between the accepted scheme of life and the exigencies of the economic
situation.

The several phases of the "woman question" have brought out in
intelligible form the extent to which the life of women in modern
society, and in the polite circles especially, is regulated by a body of
common sense formulated under the economic circumstances of an earlier
phase of development. It is still felt that woman's life, in its civil,
economic, and social bearing, is essentially and normally a vicarious
life, the merit or demerit of which is, in the nature of things, to
be imputed to some other individual who stands in some relation of
ownership or tutelage to the woman. So, for instance, any action on the
part of a woman which traverses an injunction of the accepted schedule
of proprieties is felt to reflect immediately upon the honor of the man
whose woman she is. There may of course be some sense of incongruity
in the mind of any one passing an opinion of this kind on the woman's
frailty or perversity; but the common-sense judgment of the community in
such matters is,